Just today I was talking to my colleague about how Wikipedia is great, but really slow (and often too slow to use). But there might be a solution on the horizon, as Dirson found out. He says “Google wants to collaborate with Wikipedia, and they’re planning to help this project by donating bandwidth and servers to handle part of Wikipedia’s increasing load.”

BigFoto.com offers a relatively small but OK-quality selection of free pictures for you to use. The gallery is sorted into different categories like Asia, people, or close-ups. To use an image on your web site, all you need to do is give credit by linking back to BigFoto. (Also free, and with search functionality, is the GIMP public domain photo archive.)

(Tim O’Reilly used this quote by William Gibson to explain Alpha Geeks. I came across it today over at ITConversations.com, which is quickly becoming my favorite web station. It’s full of Alpha Geeks, too.)

QuotePlay is a free Flash-based solution to link to specific parts in MP3 files. This can be used for easy quoting of podcasts. Too good to be true? Here’s the catch:

“Currently the entire MP3 has to be downloaded before even a short clip can be played, which is slow and wasteful, but an update will solve this.

Those with PHP-enabled hosting will soon be able to switch to a version which still (optionally) includes the Flash player for choosing a clip, but for playback produces a small MP3 file containing just the selected bit (so clip downloads will be small and play via the user’s own audio player).”

The Flickr Graph application by Marcos Weskamp shows the relationships among Flicker users. If you don’t know any Flickr users, try entering “Evhead" for a start (he once worked at Google’s Blogger). [Via Waxy.]

“Google is likely to require its users to begin providing personal information to use some of its products and services, said CEO Eric Schmidt. Requiring people to provide their identity and a password to gain service access is common at many Web sites, but would be new for Google. Having more personal information would enable Google to offer more useful improvements, Schmidt said.”– Michael Liedtke, Google Discusses Strategy With Analysts (AP), Feb 9, 2005